By
HADEEL AL-SHALCHI
Associated Press Writer
Apr 30, 2009
The girl was allowed to divorce the
50-year-old man who she married in August after an out-of-court settlement had
been reached in the case, said her lawyer, Abdulla al-Jeteli.
The exact date of the divorce was not immediately known.
A court in the central Oneiza region previously rejected a request by the girl's
mother for a divorce and ruled that the girl would have to wait until she
reached puberty to file a petition then.
There are no laws in
But there has been a push by Saudi human
rights groups to define the age of marriage and put an end to the phenomenon.
One Saudi human rights activist Sohaila Zain al-Abdeen was optimistic that the girl's divorce would help
efforts to get a law passed enforcing a minimum marriage age of 18.
"Unfortunately, some fathers
trade their daughters," she told The Associated Press. "They are weak
people who are sometimes in need of money and forget their roles as
parents."
It was not clear if the man
received money for the divorce settlement. The man had given the girl's father
50,000 riyals, or about $13,350, as a marriage gift in return for his daughter,
the lawyer said.
The 8-year-old girl's marriage was
not the only one in the kingdom to receive attention in recent months. Saudi
newspapers have highlighted several cases in which young girls were married off
to much older men or young boys including a 15-year-old girl whose father, a
death-row inmate, married her off to a cell mate.
But some in the government appear
to support the movement to set a minimum age for marriage. The kingdom's new
justice minister was quoted in mid-April as saying the government was doing a
study on underage marriage that would include regulations.
There are no statistics to show how
many marriages involving children are performed in